Adeline Weaver sat under the green trellis of the south door of the old Weaver mansion, and sewed her seam of fine linen. She did not like to sew, but her aunts, the Misses Jane and Eliza Weaver, with whom she lived, would have turned faint with horror had she suggested the possibility of ready-made garments. All the ladies of the Weaver family had always made their own underwear, and the custom had become, as a species of royal etiquette, not to be lightly ignored. Adeline sewed with a sort of surface patience. The green trellis over her head was all interlaced with delicate green grape-vines. The grapes had just begun to form. Tiny clusters of green globules like jewels dotted the tracery over her head. Adeline's aunts were sewing in the south room. Adeline could hear the soft murmur of their voices, but could seldom distinguish a word. The women of the Weaver family had naturally low and gentle voices with no harsh notes. There was a tradition that no women of the family ever screamed. If protest they had against pain or fear or injustice they kept it locked in their own breasts. This young Adeline was a true Weaver. She sat there in her cool, lilac muslin gown, cut V-shaped at the long, slender throat, and fastened with an amethyst brooch, with her soft gold hair parted over her serene forehead, and she was the very image of peaceful young womanhood at a peaceful task, when inwardly her whole spirit surged in a fierce revolt. Across the wide street, overarched with elms, she could see a row of neat little white cottages, each standing in its green yard. Adeline looked at them, and took another delicate stitch. She felt horribly irritated by the row of little white cottages in their green yards. She was eighteen years old, and she had never spent a night away from home, and her room faced those cottages, and she had never waked in the morning to another prospect. She had been educated by her aunts and a governess who was a distant relative of the family. The governess was a maiden lady, and she had taught the girl in a stereotyped fashion, as she and the Misses Weaver had been taught.
Now that her education was finished, the one thing which really asserted itself within her, and which was beyond all education, was her own youth, and her longing for her joy of life. The straight-laced fashion in which she had been trained made this almost abnormal. Adeline was full of dreams, but so far they had been dreams into which she could admit no man of her acquaintance without sacrilege. Still she dreamed with an innocent and almost holy ardor. This young thing fastened, as it were, by thongs of duty to age and conservatism, pulled hard at her leash. If she had ever known liberty, if she had ever had a change of scene, and lovers, they would not have seemed so precious to her. Adeline's dreams were not wholly of lovers, she dreamed also of mates of her own sex. She had never had any. Her aunts were full of a gentle but none the less obstinate pride of birth and education and modest affluence, and they considered that there were no fit mates for their niece in the village.